Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Cincinnati Musical Festival & Sir Edward Elgar: May 1906

I was recently investigating
Edward Elgar’s Overture: In the South and I came across a citation in Stewart
R. Craggs Edward Elgar Source book to a review in the Musical Times, June 1906.
This refers to the attendance of the composer at the The Seventeenth Biennial Festival of the Cincinnati Music Festival
Association. The article is worth posting – with a few footnotes.

The seventeenth biennial festival
of the Cincinnati Music Festival Association held in this city on the first
five days of the month was made notable by the presence of Sir Edward Elgar who
came from England to conduct several of his works ; by the memorial character
of the first concert, which was a tribute to the memory of Theodore Thomas
(1835-1905) who established the festivals in 1873 and conducted all the
predecessors of the present meeting ; and by an artistic and financial success
which saved the enterprise from threatened dissolution and made a remarkable
disclosure of the city's choral resources.

Dissensions between the Choir
maintained for years by the Festival Association and the Directors of the
Association culminated a year ago in the withdrawal of the Choir in a body.
Pitiable and pathetic was the fact that the quarrel grew out of an amiable
desire on the part of the choristers to give a memorial concert in honour of
their dead leader. Mr. Thomas's memory was as dear to the hearts of the
Directors as to the singers, but the former preferred to couple the memorial
service with the approaching festival and refused to sanction the plan of the
Choir. The differences were discussed in an unwise spirit, and after a year had
been spent in preparing for the seventeenth festival the Choir seceded. This
made necessary a new enlistment of choral forces.

Meanwhile Mr. Frank Van der
Stucken (1858-1929) conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra had been
elected as Mr. Thomas's successor. He began his labours in October last and
within six months accomplished the surprising feat of training the new choir of
350 voices till all were letter perfect in The
Apostles, The Dream of Gerontius,
Brahms's German Requiem, Bach's Actus Tragicus [1] and the choral
portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A supplementary choir of 1,000 children
from the public schools was also trained to sing Benoit's cantata Into the world [2]. The little people
acquitted themselves so bravely that the performance of the cantata was one of
the red-letter features of the festival from a purely artistic point of view.

Sir Edward Elgar was on the scene
a fortnight before the festival began and took upon himself the induction of
choristers and instrumentalists into his conception of his two oratorios and the
two orchestral works of his composition which were on the festival scheme. They
were the overture In the South and
the Introduction and Allegro for
strings, dedicated to Prof. Sanford, of Yale University [3]. Sir Edward's
methods of conducting differed radically from the incisive ones of Mr. Van der
Stucken, but the singers were firm in the saddle, and Sir Edward did not find
it difficult to imbue them with the spirit of his music. As a result the two
oratorios-the first of which was wholly new to the festival audience-received
the most impressive performance that they have had in America. The rendering of
The Dream of Gerontius was
spiritually much more uplifting than at the performance here under Mr. Thomas
two years ago, when much more attention was paid to the externals and less to
the tender, mystical mood of the composition.

Amongst the musicians gathered to
hear Sir Edward's reading of the oratorios were Dr. Frank Damrosch [4] who had
been the first in the American field with both The Apostles and The Dream [of Gerontius], giving both with his New
York Oratorio Society before the echoes of their first English performances had
died away-and Mr. Harrison Wild, of Chicago, who performed The Apostles with his Apollo Club [5] on the Monday of festival
week. Sir Edward found seclusion at the Country Club where, amid scenes of
great natural beauty, he spent most of his spare time reading proofs of the
work which is to be the sequel [6] to The
Apostles and working on its orchestration. He had already withdrawn himself
from most of the social attentions which the people of Cincinnati wished to
show him when the mournful intelligence of the death of his father reached him.
His manner toward the choristers had won their affection for him and his music
before the performances were reached, and the feeling seemed to be
reciprocated.

On the afternoon of the last day,
when The Dream of Gerontius was to be
given in the evening, he sent to each member of the chorus a copy of the
following letter: - I wish to express my gratitude to each member of the chorus
for the fine singing in The Apostles.
At the public concert tonight it is of course not possible for me to say
anything, so I take this opportunity to write that the performance was in every
way satisfactory and in many points supreme. I look for the same care and
enthusiasm in Gerontius this evening,
and feel assured that a great performance will be given. This word of thanks
must also be my adieu, an adieu regretfully written to my many friends in the
Cincinnati chorus. Farewell, and God bless you. (Signed) Edward Elgar.

The Musical Times June 1906 (from our own music correspondent, May
06)

Notes

[1] Gottes Zeit ist die
allerbeste Zeit (God's Time is the very best Time), BWV106, also
known as Actus Tragicus, is a sacred cantata composed by Johann
Sebastian Bach in Mühlhausen, intended for a funeral.

[3] Samuel Simons Sanford (1849–1910) was an American pianist and
educator. Sanford joined the Yale Music Faculty as Professor of Applied Music
in 1894, along with Horatio Parker as Professor of Theory. During the sixteen
years he worked at Yale, he refused to be paid any salary as he was
independently wealthy (Wikipedia)

[4] Frank Heino Damrosch (1859 -1937)
was a German-born American music conductor and educator.

[5] The 33-member men's chorus of
the Apollo Musical Club was founded in 1872. It is now called the Apollo Chorus
of Chicago and as still among the largest American volunteer choirs.

About Me

I am well over fifty years old: the end of the run of baby boomers! I was born in Glasgow, moving south to York in the late ‘seventies. I now work in London.
My main interest is British Music from the nineteenth century onwards.
I love the ‘arch-typical’ English countryside – and have always wanted to ‘Go West, Boy’.
A. E. Housman and the ‘Georgian’ poets are a huge influence on my aesthetic. I have spent much of my life looking for the ‘Land of Lost Content’ and only occasionally glimpsed it…somewhere in…???
My recently published work includes essays on Ivor Gurney’s song ‘On Wenlock Edge’ for the Gurney Society Journal, The Music of Marion Scott and a study of Janet Hamilton’s songs for the British Music Society Journal, and the composer Muriel Herbert for the Housman Society.
I have contributed to the journals of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, the Finzi Society, and the Bliss Society, the Berkeley Society, the BMS Newsletter and regular CD reviews for MusicWeb International.